Category: Uncategorized

It was a very, very long week. Almost everything in it was good, but there was just too much of it. Today, I had just two meetings (both good), and planned to spend the rest of the day puttering. Then Kev reminded me that we needed to go look at cars, ugh, so we went. I know some people love shopping for cars, but that is not me — I just want a car that reliably works, that can safely haul all my stuff, and that I don’t have to think about.

It needed to be done, so I went, and then thankfully came home to watch dumb yet delightful holiday movies (currently The Princess Switch, which has no surprises in it whatsoever) and putter in the kitchen. Making soaps and sweets is all I want to do right now. I also have to do some e-mail, I’m afraid, but mostly, this weekend I am immersing myself in making little lovely things to sell at Pem Hessing‘s Colorful Holiday event coming up in a few weeks.

Plan for today — stop watching GBBO (Netflix, now was not the ideal time to drop season 6, I have things to do). Finish grading papers. Finish grading mid-terms. (I’m so close to done — why is the last hour always the hardest???)

At 11, go take a look at some possible spaces (some in Scoville Square, probably out of our price range, one just south of the highway on Oak Park Ave). Feel drowned in choices and possibilities, but hopefully in a good way.

12 – 2, monthly Garden Club meeting; I’ll probably be late, but I do want to stop by, at least. Today’s talk — “A Rose By Any Other Name” — Jack Shouba, on “The importance of scientific names.” I don’t actually know anything about this topic! Would like to learn.

Then prep for evening monthly writing workshop, more grading, work on condensing my scattered maker space notes into something coherent that I can hand to people, instead of the 20+ page monstrosity I have now.

Maybe write a little? Last night, I started work on the Domestic Resistance book, cutting and pasting my running for office posts into one file. That’ll form the core thread of the book, I think, balancing that with the political trauma of the last two years, and the domestic makings (cooking, gardening, time with family and friends) that keep me sane.

I’m having more novel thoughts too, off and on, esp. as I keep reading Jemisin’s work. She’s so good with the world building and really thinking through rich cultural elements — I’ve skimped on that on this first draft, and rather than just plowing forward with the plot, I kind of think I want to stop, go back, and really layer that through. The book will get more dense, but I think that’s a good thing. I also hope to find room for more dialogue and scenes of everyday life. If I write a novel that’s mostly people sitting around and talking to each other, you guys are okay with that, right?

We had a meeting last night about the makerspace, etc. project, and mostly determined that we should focus our Big Idea grant proposal on the makerspace piece. If that happens in isolation, great — if we can raise enough funds to do a bigger space with co-working, cafe + shop, artist studios, residency program, low-income artist housing, etc., also great. I need to put together a list of places we’ll be applying to for grants (could use help with that!) Good progress.

Most of the last few weeks has been heavily scheduled with meetings as I try to get feedback, collaborative vision, buy-in from lots of local folk — people in government, housing, arts, business, etc. There’s going to be lots more of that! Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to has been supportive of the idea, and most have been genuinely excited by it! It’s the sort of thing where you look at it and say, “I can’t believe we don’t have this already!”

Two of our people have now taken the proposal to try to turn my wordiness into two tight opening paragraphs. I am terrible at boiling things down to sound-bites, elevator pitches, and even concise paragraphs. I just want to put in more words. Brutal concision is not my strength, and I’m grateful that they’re taking a stab at it. 🙂

They’ll give it back in a week, and then I’ll try to draft answers to the rest of the proposal questions, and then we’ll meet again to review that draft and fine-tune it. I need to start collecting supplemental materials too — a list of other makerspaces, photos of great makerspaces we can compare to, for example.

I’m spending time in upcoming weeks touring possible rental spaces, hoping to find someone willing to donate space or at least let us use it at significantly below-market rates for a while. We could do a month-to-month lease to get the project off the ground. (If this is maybe you, get in touch, please!)

Ideally, our main space down the line would be big, near transit, and near both Austin / Berwyn (so Arts District or near Oak Park and Harrison would be ideal). But a big space may be years off, and in the meantime, we could put a makerspace in something as small as 300 sq. ft. — though definitely having more like 900-1200 would be better, letting us fit in lounge and classroom / meeting space as well, plus a coffee station!

I’m having a budget meeting today with a finance person who will help me start drafting a spreadsheet (volunteering his time, so kind). Space rental, tool purchase, furniture and supplies, insurance, permits and fees, and if we have some money left over for staffing, that’d be good, but initially, I suspect we’ll be relying on volunteers (working in the space) to keep the doors open.

We’re going to aim for being financially self-reliant through class tuition, memberships, and space rental in off hours, with fundraising to help us lower costs as much as possible — making everything sliding-scale, and offering free scholarships. We’re also going to have one day / week open for walk-in free making — the Chicago Public library does Wednesday 1-8, which sounds like a good possibility, though Saturday might also be good.

If you’re in the Oak Park area, an artist or educator or just someone who thinks we should have a place where we can introduce people to all kinds of making in a fun, low-cost environment, and want to be involved in the project in some way (planning, volunteering, donating, teaching), please do get in touch! We will need lots of help getting this off the ground.

Things are progressing. 🙂 It’s exciting to see this taking shape!!!

(I borrowed the graphic from the NUSD Makerspace task force — isn’t it charming? We may need to make our own version.)

Got in to World Fantasy around 9:30 last night, held at a waterfront hotel in Baltimore. I actually managed to make it to the tail end of the panel I’d been scheduled on (and then taken off, because I didn’t think I’d make it in time), so that’s 15 minutes of hopefully usefulness to the community? I don’t know.

Amusingly, someone in the audience actually brought up Earthsea, so I got to talk about the Tor.com piece I published yesterday, which I actually like more now than I did when I wrote it. I think you could even get something out of it if you’d never read Earthsea, or even Le Guin. It ended up as hopefully something of an antidote to these trying times. Or maybe a prescription.

I also had a very interesting conversation with a publisher — I think I know where I’m sending the revision of Flight now, which is exciting. It’s going to end up around 50K, I think, which is an awkward length, and I wasn’t sure where to place it, but now I think I have a possible home — they’d consider it a novel and bring it out as a book, which I think is right for it. I’d actually love to have it at this house; fingers crossed, and toes too.

I’m hoping I can talk a few friends into reading it first, because while it’s pretty solid at this point, I really want it to be the best it can be before it goes out. I also think I need to work through, emotionally, the fact that I’m probably never going to come out with a ‘debut novel’ that makes a big splash. It’s a writer’s dream, but I’m not sure it’s going to be my path.

Bodies in Motion was linked stories, and so was The Stars Change, and maybe I’m just not built for writing big, fat Great American novels. Or maybe Flight will actually be that great debut novel, despite being slim, and more of an intimate family story than anything world-changing. Well, we’ll see. It is what it is, and when I tried to force it to have a bigger scope, that didn’t work at all.

Other than that, last night was just chatting with old friends and meeting new people for a few hours in the bar / lounge. It’s on the 5th floor at this hotel, which is taking me a little while to get used to. I can see why they did it this way, because it means you get beautiful views of the harbor from the restaurant.

This is a very pleasant place to grab a morning cup of coffee with an old friend, C.c. Finlay, editor of The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy — it’s a magazine I have yet to crack, but I’m coming for you, Charlie! I’m going to write you a story that you *have* to publish, because it’s just that good.

Now I’ve retired to my own table, to consume one of my crabby eggs benedict (so much food — will have to find someone to feed the other one to — maybe I can talk my roommate, Angeli, into it), and then settle down to two hours powering through e-mail.

Ah, the excitement of the writer’s life. It’s pretty exciting, actually. Or at least satisfying, pleasurable, interesting — I feel lucky.

Congrats again to Alec Nevala-Lee on his new book, _Astounding_! It was great being in a conversation with him, Keisha Howard, and Michi Trotaabout diversity in speculative fiction at Open Books. Wish we’d recorded it — we really do need to do a podcast. 🙂

Slow start, but I’ve finally made it out to the shed for the morning. It’s cool and blustery out, but I’ve figured out how to drape the blanket in my shed safely over my legs resting on the ottoman, with the little shed heater underneath (carefully not touching anything), and make a toasty little cave. (Inspired by Japanese table heaters, kotatsu.)

It actually gets too warm pretty quickly, and the heater gets moved back out from under the blanket, but is v. nice for settling into autumn shed work. Instant warmth! For winter work, I may need to seal the windows with plastic wrap and maybe even hang some thick curtains, but for now, I’m enjoying all the light flooding in. I’ve brought some tea lights and incense out here too, and all of that helps settle me into writing mode.

Plan for today: spend an hour working on the Le Guin essay, then get dressed and head into the city to Open Books for a panel on SF diversity with Michi Trota and Alec Nevala-Lee, also celebrating the release of Alec’s new book, _Astounding_! I’m enjoying it, and plan to read more of it on the train. Fascinating getting a glimpse into the secret lives of Asimov and the rest of that crew.

After that, just come home and more writing, I think, with possibly a stop at an event sponsored by our local 19th century club, Jackets and Jewelry; they’re selling gently-used blazers and the like, and while I have enough jewelry, I think I need to up my professional dress game a bit, for both speaking engagements and politics. You know, before last year, I don’t think I owned a blazer at all? And now, I find I want one. Maybe a few. I’m building up my collection of solid color sheath dresses too. I’d like to get some nice desi-style jewelry to wear with it — Seena was wearing a great piece yesterday, and I was jealous.

If there’s time today, I’d like to do a bit more gardening — I dug up the last of the dahlias yesterday, and prepped some for trading with a neighbor — the rest need to be packaged up for winter storage in the basement. But before that, there are some divided irises that need to get into the ground, and more tulips to plant.

I made the mistake of leaving some on the porch, and the squirrels dug into two of the bags, so I’m short a few tulips. Oh well.

It was a lot of fun, though also funny because two of the guests were radio journalists (Niala Boodhoo and Monica Eng), and Monica has actually written a children’s book with magician) and another was a foodie and furniture building artisan (Randall Kramer) interested in teaching at our makerspace, and another runs Bookwallah, a non-profit that sends picture books to orphanages in India, (Seena Jacob). Whew!

Between all that, there were gazillion things to talk about and also gazillion questions, so I couldn’t really run it like I would normally run a class. At one point, someone jokingly suggested that maybe they should raise their hands so I could get a word in edgewise, “Oh teacher? Teacher??” and they were joking but it actually might have helped! (I’m teasing — they were lovely.)

Afterwards, showed the guests my little writing shed. One of them saw a squirrel sitting on the gate and she stopped short and said, “It’s like walking into an English children’s book.” Yes, pretty much. 🙂

One of the issues I’ve focused on as a library board trustee is looking at how our library approaches diversity. As a queer brown woman, I have to think that part of why I was elected was because my constituents wanted me to be paying attention to that issue.

Last night as part of the board packet, there was a detailed report on diversity initiatives from various of our librarians, addressing different aspects of the issue. Generally, I think our librarians are doing a pretty stellar job of working on this problem, and could serve as a model for other institutions.

But I’m mostly writing here because I wanted to take a moment to point out just how difficult a problem it is, and how, despite years of effort on our librarians’ part, our collection of books, in particular, still skews very white. That is entirely because American publishing still skews very white — the vast majority of books published, including children’s books, still feature white protagonists.

Our librarians try to balance the general audience’s desire for popular books (which is influenced / limited by what major publishers actually put out, what readers see on the bookstore shelves, or at their friends’ houses, or reviewed in major news sources), with the librarians’ own attempts at increasing diverse representation.

(A tremendous tool for librarians in the latter efforts, by the way, are the various blogs and booklists maintained by various communities and reviewers of color, so keep that up, people, please! It’s made it much easier for our librarians to find brilliant, fabulous #ownvoices titles, often from small presses that would otherwise fly under the radar.)

But we’re still quite far from even reflecting the community around us in Oak Park (which is currently around 68% white). Our librarians are going to keep working the problem, and they’re making improvements every week. To really fix it, though, we need big changes in publishing.

Publishers, editors — get on that, please. I know I’m preaching to the choir a bit here, for the publishing folks I’m friends with, who are likely to see this, but maybe this will add a note of urgency to your efforts.

We can’t read the books that show our diverse world in its complex truth if those books aren’t even being published. Our kids can’t read them either.

“This is the complete audio of our panel on “What are Censorship’s Real Historical Consequences” featuring Gehnwa Hayek (censorship of comics in contemporary Lebanon), James Larue (American Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom), Mary Anne Monharaj (literary consequences of colonialism in Sri Lanka), Anthony Grafton (censorship of Renaissance books & Jewish books), plus co-organizers Cory Doctorow, Adrian Johns, and Ada Palmer. The video is still being processed but we’re delighted to share the audio in this preview form to give you a first taste!”

So, I’ve been on Vyvanse for a few weeks now, but one aspect of it not being a good trial yet is that those weeks were so busy that I dropped my daily cardio. Adding it back in today, and hoping to *not* drop it again — 20 minutes on the treadmill in the morning really does make my day better; I just have to habituate it to it again. (Got up and dressed in exercise clothes first thing; good start, need to get back into that habit.)

Will be curious to see how the meds work in combination with daily cardio — I’ve been sort of tired and logy the last week, and it’s tempting to blame the meds, though it’s honestly hard to say how much of that is just being unusually busy.

Plan for today:

Morning:

– exercise

– make sure Kavi is up and getting herself to school (Mondays are hard)